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Display advertising - targetting

I am looking into running adverts on the display network and see there is a range of options available for targetting potential customers I see that the list includes the following:

1 placement targeting

2 contextual targeting

3 interest category targeting

4 keyword targeting

5 demographic targeting

Can anyone tell me what the best option or combination of this options is? The product I am selling is a weight loss product targeted at women. There are a few companies currently selling this product on the market and we are not the cheapest. I look forward to hearing from you.

2 Responses

Without going into an insane amount of detail, if you have the budget, I'd try a little bit of everything. For you, I would suggest:

Retargeting: Display ads to people who have been to your site, but didn't convert.

Placement targeting: Use Google ad planner, or just surf the web to find sites that are relevant to your demographic and show ads.

Interest category targeting: I'd use this if there are relevant categories for you to target. If they're too broad, cross it with some topic or keyword targeting.

Keyword targeting is the oldest, and doesn't work as well as it used to for us. You could use this to explore and find new placements, then add them to your placement targeting campaign.

Topic targeting is bad on its own in my experience.

Demographics is great, but will reduce volume a lot. If it's already a weight loss site you're putting your ad on, there's probably no need to apply it here. A lot of people reside in the "Unknown" categories for Gender and Age.

If you're an existing Adwords customer and have reps, you can get into their search companion marketing beta. We've been seeing great results from this. For example, when someone searches for "weight loss", and clicks through to a page with Google ads, you can now target them on the display network.

Remember that you can apply remarketing lists and demographics to search as well as display! And also be wary of mobile if that's not great for you. Now with enhanced campaigns, you're automatically opted into mobile...

I've had different experiences than Dana, I've had by far the most success with Adwords, little success with Facebook, and no success with StumbleUpon. Twitter is also another viable option, and they have their own set of targeting options (and you have to run a Twitter account already). LinkedIn doesn't sound right for this. :) YouTube could be good too, although the CPCs there tend to be pretty high.

I would think Facebook should be good for you... you can target to women of a certain age who like other weight loss products.

Yes, yes and yes. Target everything, target as tightly as possible. You'll save yourself money. All that being said, I haven't found targeting in Google's display network to be as robust as I'd like it to be. Have you looked into StumbleUpon Paid Advertising and Facebook Ads. Personally, I'd give those a go first. StumbleUpon in particular is extremely affordable.

Another option for display ads in Google that might be less expensive and offer more of the targeting you are looking for would be via YouTube video display advertising. I've heard that there's a lot of inventory (maybe because advertisers haven't quite caught on to using it yet?) and as a result the CPAs are lower than via regular display network advertising.

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